Red Tape Was His Undoing : Bryan Hand Was to Help Arizona’s Offensive Line, but Confusing NCAA Regulations Ended Up Costing JC Transfer a Year of Eligibility

Bryan Hand’s family and friends could not believe his unshakable spirit. There he was, two weeks ago, one of those hoisting Steve McLaughlin into the air after McLaughlin had kicked a last-second field goal that beat Stanford.

Wearing a Wildcat game jersey, cap and an infectious smile, Hand blended into the sea of blue and white uniforms in Arizona Stadium.

Simply one of the guys.

If only it were that easy.

Hand, a Junior College All-American offensive lineman last year, was declared ineligible this season, not because he accepted money from boosters or failed a drug test or had poor grades or a criminal record.

Hand lost a year’s eligibility because he was academically deficient when transferring from Orange Coast College to Arizona last winter. By all accounts, he was short one laboratory science class that he did not know he needed until it was too late.

Hand has been caught in a tangled web of NCAA transfer regulations that are, at best, complex. In the era of NCAA reform, his ordeal illustrates the need for clarity in the guidelines.

“What looks fine, what I’ve been told by (two) JCs, counselors, athletic academic advisers, recruiters all over the nation, turns out not to be,” Hand said recently.

“I have been misled so many times (in community college) but I still got my units completed, still worked late at nights. . . . I said, ‘What else could go wrong?’ ”

Plenty, it turns out.

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As a 6-foot-5, 295-pound lineman with agility and speed, Hand was expected to fill a big void for Arizona’s offense this season. He was expected to be one of those anonymous hulks banging away in the middle when the seventh-ranked Wildcats face No. 15 UCLA on Saturday night at the Rose Bowl.

But Hand will not be in Pasadena for what could prove to be a pivotal Pacific 10 Conference game. He will be in Tucson, watching the game on television.

How it came to this is, to say the least, unusual.

Kathleen LaRose, Arizona’s associate athletic director in charge of sports activities and programs, said most community college transfers go smoothly. But she said it is difficult to safeguard each athlete’s eligibility.

The events that have haunted Hand began in the fall of 1990. He started the semester at Golden West College in Huntington Beach as a full-time student, a member of the football team.

Then he dropped to part-time status when his ailing mother, Lee, was on the verge of death. His family’s medical bills were mounting.

He remained on the football team, however, when a Golden West administrator persuaded him to do so for his mental well-being.

Later, after the family crisis had subsided, Hand resumed his schooling at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, where he became one of the country’s biggest and strongest linemen.

Hand, 22, then transferred to Arizona last January with a 2.89 grade-point average for the 60 units the university accepted. Because he had passed the required core courses in high school and scored well enough on the Scholastic Aptitude Test, he was eligible for NCAA competition without having earned an Associate of Arts degree.

Or so everyone told him.

Three months into the semester, during spring football drills, Arizona officials discovered an error in their--and everyone else’s--calculations.

When Arizona recruiters evaluated Hand’s grades, they treated the fall of 1990 as a part-time semester. But because Hand started with 12 credits, the NCAA counts it as a full-time semester. As a result, he needed an AA degree to be eligible under the number of transfer credits Arizona accepted. That Hand dropped to part-time status within weeks in 1990 did not matter, according to NCAA regulations.

Further confounding matters, NCAA rules stipulate that once a two-year athlete transfers to a university, he or she cannot return to the community college to complete the AA degree. So, even if Hand had returned to Orange Coast last summer and fulfilled his graduation requirements, he still would have been ineligible.

“The NCAA traditionally (has) rules written (to) harass community college transfers,” said Bill Workman, Orange Coast’s football coach. “I have never even heard of that rule. I guess we (Orange Coast and Arizona) both screwed up on some obscure rule.”

Hand, from Irvine, realizes now that his naivete cost him a year of Division I football. He says if he had it to do over, he would monitor his academic path instead of relying on counselors, who admittedly were confused by the transfer regulations.

Coach Dick Tomey said Arizona administrators were unable to properly assess Hand’s transcripts until after the football player enrolled because the official documents did not arrive until then.

Still, Arizona recruiters had the unofficial transcripts, and some suggest they simply misinterpreted the rules. Tomey said it is a problem for all two-year transfers, particularly those who arrive in midyear.

“You just can’t always plug up all the holes and make sure everything runs smoothly,” LaRose said. “I think the University of Arizona has acted responsibly.”

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While Hand was losing a year’s eligibility, a number of other cases were revealing vastly different conclusions:

--Three University of Washington football players involved in NCAA violations that resulted in two-year probations were reinstated by the NCAA eligibility committee after nine days. Two of the players, Beno Bryant and Joe Kralik, were suspended for one game. The other, Marco D’Farr, was immediately eligible after repaying $20.

--Jamir Miller, one of two UCLA football players who pleaded no contest to charges of receiving stolen property, was suspended for one game by school officials. Bruce Walker, the other player involved, was suspended for the season, but allowed to redshirt. He is expected to return next fall.

--Freshman Cameron Davis, a backup defensive end at Florida, was declared eligible after Davis appealed the NCAA’s rule that stipulates a 24 credit-hour minimum for athletes during a school year. Davis earned 12 hours last fall, but was suspended in the spring for violating dormitory rules. He earned 12 hours’ worth of credits this summer, giving him 24 for the year.

Hand’s father, Bruce, a criminal justice and public administration professor at Golden West, has trouble with the standards used to penalize players.

He said an NCAA official told him, “It may not be fair but that’s the law. You can be a (criminal) and still play in the NCAA but if you lack one unit or have a technical problem, we will deny you eligibility.”

Arizona appealed Hand’s case twice to the Administrative Review Panel, a five-member group initiated last January to handle special circumstances other than those from the NCAA eligibility committee or committee on infractions.

Stan Wilcox, the NCAA staff liaison to the committee, said panel members were unsympathetic because Hand continued to play football in 1990 despite the family crisis.

Hand asked the panel to regard his part-time status as a medical hardship because his mother had been undergoing painful chemotherapy treatments in 1990. She also suffered a second heart attack at the time. So Hand, besides attending classes, practice and holding a full-time job as a nightclub bouncer from 8:30 p.m. to 2:30 a.m., was visiting his mother daily at the hospital.

Compounding the crisis were insurance problems. Bruce and Lee Hand’s carriers argued over who should be paying for her treatment. As a result, the Hands owed $59,000 before the situation could be resolved.

The experience was emotionally draining, Hand said, and he was ready to quit school altogether.

He planned to work at a furniture store during the days and continue working as a bouncer at nights to ease the family burden.

But Fred Owens, Golden West’s vice president for administrative affairs, advised Hand to remain in school with a reduced course load. He also told him to keep playing. In a letter to Arizona officials, Owens wrote that Hand needed football to help him through.

“At no time, while counseling Bryan through this hardship, did we ever consider or address the possible ramifications of future college eligibility,” Owens wrote.

Hand did not want to use the family crisis as an excuse when appealing. Arizona officials persuaded him to do so because it was perhaps his best chance to regain the year, they told him.

“I’m sitting here exploiting my mom and my family problems to try to (make up) for something that (wasn’t his fault to begin with),” Hand said.

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Hand was not the player he is today when he graduated from the Army-Navy Academy in Carlsbad in 1989. He was 6-4 and 220 pounds while playing at the small prep school.

But once his mother’s condition started to improve in 1991, Hand was able to spend more time training. He took a year off from football to concentrate on school, work and weightlifting.

And he started to sprout. By the time he transferred to Orange Coast in the spring of ‘92, he had bulked up to 275 pounds. Before playing a down at Orange Coast, Hand was touted as a preseason All-American.

Although the year at Orange Coast proved beneficial, it also led to another mistake in his academic progress. Hand had been a criminal justice major at Golden West, a special program that does not transfer to its sister school in Costa Mesa. So, although he had completed 80 units of community college credits in 3 1/2 years, he was short a lab science for a general education degree.

That did not daunt recruiters. Hand was solicited by 61 colleges, including Georgia, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Washington. Many of those schools would have accepted 72 transfer units, 12 more than Arizona, and that would have kept him eligible this season under the NCAA formula of needing 12 units a semester.

Still, Hand does not regret moving to Tucson--although his new pickup truck was stolen last month. He is attending classes in the mornings and training in the afternoon and evenings. He is grateful for the scholarship, and embarrassed that he cannot help the Wildcats this season. Tomey has tried three players at offensive right tackle--Hand’s designated position--somewhat unsuccessfully.

Although Hand cannot practice with the team, he supports the Wildcats at home games by sitting on the bench. He loves the game too much to stay away.

He remains hopeful that another appeal could grant him an extra year in 1995. He said he wants the extra year to gain more experience before attempting to play in the NFL.

“Now I need to make a stink,” he said. “Now I need to exploit people at the universities, people who have admitted to the NCAA they’ve done wrong. Now it has gone beyond helping anybody except to look out for (myself).”